Tim Cook: Bloomberg should retract article on Supermicro hack

Apple CEO Tim Cook has said in an interview with Buzzfeed that Bloomberg should retract a recent article stating that the Chinese government put small chips on Supermicro motherboards that ended up with Apple, among others.

Buzzfeed editors write that they conducted a telephone interview with Cook, in which he said of the Bloomberg article, “Their story about Apple isn’t true. They should make the right decision and retract it.” He added that he was involved in communicating about the article from the start. “I personally spoke with the Bloomberg editors along with our then attorney Bruce Sewell. We made it very clear that this didn’t happen and answered all their questions. Each time they came to us, the story had changed and each time they had we conducted an investigation that turned up nothing.”

Cook speaks of e-mails being searched during those investigations, as were financial records, data center records and delivery details. Also, the Bloomberg editors would never have come up with hard evidence, but only “with vague second-hand stories.” The news agency said in a response to Buzzfeed that the article is the result of more than a year of work and more than a hundred interviews. Seventeen sources are said to have confirmed the information. “We stand by our story and have confidence in our reporting and sources,” said a spokesperson.

Bloomberg published the article two weeks ago. It claimed that the Chinese government had placed spy chips on Supermicro server motherboards, which then ended up in the data centers of major companies such as Amazon and Apple. In this way it would have been possible to create a backdoor that gave access to the networks of these servers. Apple and Amazon soon published extensive denials. The US and UK, among others, said they had no doubts about these denials.